Bryce Cutlip

The wheel is just a page. That's the part nobody warns you about — the anticlimax of it, the loading spinner, the cheap flash animation like a slot machine skinned for a site with a cards.io font. You have wanted this since before you could say what "this" was. Every story where someone wakes up wrong. Every thread at two in the morning where people describe it like a fever they wish were real. Tuesday, nothing on, the kind of tired that isn't sleepy, just done — and there it is in a tab you almost close, vessel.cards, a wheel that says PAY. SPIN. BECOME. You do not believe it. You pay anyway. The wheel spins so long you think it's broken.

Then it isn't your evening anymore.

You're standing. That's the first thing — the floor is real under feet that aren't feet you remember owning, and there's a shirt open down your chest, and a tie hanging loose and untied against skin that's warm and not cold the way you expected somehow, though you never let yourself expect anything specific. Your hand — his hand — is already moving before you catch up to it, flat against the ribs, feeling them like counting. The buttons under your fingers are wrong, everyone's off by one, and something in the muscle memory beneath you — not yours, never yours — twitches with irritation at that, fixes it without asking you first. Undone. Redone. Correct. The tie goes up and knots itself in a shape your hands have never made and his have made four hundred times, a trade-school half-Windsor nobody in this bedroom has ever tied before tonight, apparently, by the surprised stall of your own fingers at the collar.

You're not driving yet. You're a passenger behind his sternum, and then the shirt against your back exhales him into you.

Bryce Cutlip. Forty-two years old and the name arrives with weight, like a badge does. Corrections officer, Eastern Kentucky, gate duty, the smell of cinderblock paint that never fully dries in your memory no matter how many summers pass. The shirt is what starts it — its collar knows his neck, and through that: three years old, rocking on your chest in this same house, before the addition, before the second kid. Then the tie — clip-on for years until his oldest laughed at him for it and he learned to knot one properly out of spite, at the bathroom mirror, cussing softly, getting it in nine tries. Then the mattress under you, the give of it, and that's the wife's side gone cold already, up before him, coffee smell down the hall, and a fondness so unremarkable it's almost invisible, the kind that doesn't announce itself because it never had to.

Under your sock feet, carpet worn thin in a path from bed to closet, seventeen years of the same walk. Twenty-two hundred square feet he still calls "more house than we need" though the money stopped being a worry a while back — corrections pays better than people think once you've got rank, and there's the land besides, his father's, sold smart. Not that he'd say the number out loud to anyone. Not the kind of man who says numbers out loud.

The wedding band. You feel it without looking, a small ridge of metal your thumb finds and turns once, a habit that isn't a thought. Her name arrives with it, soft-edged, and behind her, worn at the corners like a photograph handled too much: an old girlfriend, a name that still does something to the chest when it surfaces, harmless now, just a door that opens onto a version of him that didn't happen. Three kids. A specific weight of a small one on his shoulders at a county fair, corn dust and floodlights, older ones now, one learning to drive, the terror and pride of that braided together.

Gum. Your jaw is already working something that isn't there — a phantom motion, muscle looking for spearmint it hasn't got yet, an ache of habit. Somewhere in the bones of the jaw is the vape too, a pull he'll want before the gate, before the corridor, before eight hours of cinderblock and men who hate him on principle and men who don't, quite, and the particular tired that comes from being armed and bored in the same hour for two decades.

Your legs know how to stand at that gate. Weight balanced, shoulders square without trying, a body built by nothing more dramatic than years of a job that rewards not being soft. Strong through the chest and forearms in a way that has nothing to do with vanity. A low ache low in the back that flares getting up in the morning and fades by the second cup of coffee — not there yet, not this morning, this morning it's just the ordinary stiffness of forty-two.

Dimples, even now, even doing nothing — you feel the shape of his face settle into them at rest, like his face is built around a joke it's not telling.

None of this is yours. It comes through anyway, the shirt's memory in your shoulders, the tie's memory in your fingers, the room's memory in your feet, and you stand at the foot of a stranger's bed wearing all of it like a coat that already fits.

Your — his — hand comes up in front of your face. You turn it over. The band catches lamp light.

"Well," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that isn't the one you don't have, "that's new."